Tuesday, July 24, 2018

What Happens After Crossing The Rubicon

{WRSA linkers: If you got here because of a bad link there, the Z-Man blogpost you were trying for is here. I've e-mailed CA at WRSA, and I'm sure he'll fix it ASAP. If this is the post you were looking for, press on. - A.}

More thoughts on that last post, courtesy of comments:
No one sane on our side (and everyone isn't, sadly) wants armed open conflict, or is sanguine about it, least of all this author. Having been there first hand, the guy least enthusiastic about jingoistic saber-rattling is the guy riding the landing ship towards the beach. But ultimately, that's a bilateral deal, and the Left isn't even that sane. They don't just want it and fantasize about it frequently and publicly, they brag and gloat about unleashing it. Our side understands that sort of posturing as a precursor to it actually breaking out, because we, unlike they, understand human nature and the behavior of flawed human beings.

And/or the aggression rituals of chimps and apes, take your pick.

Verily, I know somebody running a gun store who once asked a teenaged idiot employee to stop playing around with an actual unsheathed samurai sword. Said teenager responded, "Make me" and raised the sword above his shoulder from twenty feet away, as if to indicate he was willing to open the ball. And found himself looking at the gaping muzzle of a cocked-and-locked .45 steadily pointed right at his face, by someone who's actually killed bad people before with one. That's the exact metaphor for what's going on with all the #Resistance horseshi*t now, except the "firing" and "termination" this bunch of teenaged-mentality idiots will get won't be anything as gentle as the one received by the former employee on that day.


As one of my drill instructors cautioned my group: "I see a baby, I'ma throw a grenade at dat baby. If da baby blow up twice, da baby was booby-trapped."

Our would-be, now disdained and mostly discarded "leadership" of milquetoasts is the reason the Left is such a problem in the first place, and also the reason Trump is the president now. Had they manfully opposed utter socialist nonsense when it was far cheaper and easier to do so, they would not now find themselves in the role of political appendix, and about to be removed like a wayward and infected organ.

And when conflict, near inevitably now, breaks out, they will be overtaken by events, overruled, the lucky ones simply voted out, the hangers-on even bum-rushed and whacked over the head, and it'll be nothing but wartime consiglieres after that, until happier times.


The current Left is, metaphorically, re-arming against the Versailles Treaty, occupying the Rhineland, annexing the Sudetenland, rounding up Jews and dissidents, and happily dividing up Poland. (To modernize the parable, this time their co-conspirator is Islam and the Turd World, they themselves being actual Mussolini, actual Hitler, actual Tojo, and actual Stalin simultaneously. Oh, and BTW, Mike Godwin can once again kiss my ass. Calling Nazis, acting like Nazis, Nazis isn't Godwin's Law: it's quaintly been known as "Reality" for at least 6000 years of recorded human history.)

The Left have shown no ability to function any longer in the prior peacetime model, nor can grasp the most basic concept in a democratic republic of taking their lumps, learning the  lessons of those lumps, and waiting their turn again, should it ever come. They're not only doubling down on their Stupid, they can't believe it didn't work the last time, and now they've completely jumped the shark, and have decided that since their manifest fitness to rule was denied, war must be declared. They have spent the last nearly two years angling with every fiber for the Harper's Ferry or Fort Sumter moment to finally instigate the conflagration, and they take every predictable fresh failure as nothing but an excuse to try again, "More, harder, faster!"

Conditioned by a long tradition of Phony War and appeasement, and the faux "conservative" ilk that would institutionalize it, they think they'll merely have to shoot a couple of egregious examples, and then we'll all similarly retire to the fainting couch, and acquiesce to the destruction of our entire society and culture, and its cheerful re-imagining in the model of Lenin and Stalin, because they delusionally fantasize "this time, we'll make communism work!"

They won't realize the magnitude of that error until we firebomb Dresden. Some of them still won't figure it out walking up the gibbet steps at Nuremburg once it's over.

Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

I'm not sanguine about conflict starting, but once it does, I want the response to be to remove the instigators not just from power, but from existence, once and for all. The half-stepping victories of 1918 and 1991 only taught tyrants that if they just endured, they could come back again and have another go. If you're going to fight a war, it has be 1945, or the Third Punic War: turn their capitol to rubble, burn the sand into glass, leave no stone on top of another, kill their men, enslave their women, cheerfully dash their babies' heads on rocks, slaughter their livestock and salt their fields, that they might never, ever trouble sensible and peaceful humanity again.

When you abide by the rules of peaceful exchange of power, as we have in this republic for 229 years, when you lose, you get to go back to your mansion, sulk, and get book deals and speakers' fees, or bide your time for the pendulum to swing. But if you tried to win by going to guns, you're not going back to the villa afterwards, even if you only preened about "bombing the White House", or mock-beheading the President for a cheap laugh. You lot doing that, if you get the war you dream of, are going to get dragged out of your houses by your hair, strung up to a nearby light pole by whatever length of cable is handy, or simply shot in the head, if folks inclined will even waste the bullet.

Change your moonbat rhetoric, or we'll open your minds, 158 grains at a time.

Only then will you realize that some people ought to have been left alone.

Neither the Carthaginians of old, nor liberal idiots of today, seem adept at learning that lesson.
Learning it properly will only require one lesson, and that one will last the rest of their brief lives.

This won't be Appomattox Court House: once you get the Right out the door with weapons in hand, what follows will see the Democrat Party as the Nazi Party circa 1946. What will happen to survivors and relatives will make Manzanar and even Auschwitz look like summer church camp by comparison. You heard it here first.

What Selco, FerFal, and others who've been there get right is that meltdowns are gradual, and far more brutal that what prepper doom-porno fantasies think they'll be.

What they get wrong is that once you move this body politic to war, the ensuing conflict will do justice to Antietam and Gettysburg, except with the weapons and sensibilities that created Dresden and Hiroshima. This is a nation of over 300M people, with nuclear weapons and a military whose annual budget dwarfs that of the next ten nations, year over year, and 60% of the weapons held in private hands, in the entire world. It is not Spain in the 1930s, or Zimbabwe, former Yugoslavia, Argentina, or Venezuela. Scale your expectations up, good and bad, accordingly.

It is in the nature of wildfires to get away from people, and a cultural society-wide civil (it will, in truth, be anything but) war of absolute survival will not stay a well-tended backyard trash fire, but sparks will fly, winds will swirl, and pretty soon, the whole damned forest will be gloriously and fearfully ablaze, and the only thing that controls it then will be what's left to burn, and when a merciful heaven sends a rainstorm.

Nothing less.

Wrap your heads around that.

People thinking in terms of a limited conflict, or any sort of happy, civilized divorce and secession, are whistling past the graveyard, and about as bright as those who talked about waging "limited" nuclear warfare. I'm here to tell you they're stupidly misinformed at best, and deranged at worst.

And no one will be blindly foolish enough to think they've achieved some personal unbreachable Maginot Line to contentedly sit behind, and wait until The Problem arrives on their own doorstep. When they hear that "It's on!", they're more likely to go out looking for people to tear up. And they won't come home again until they're either out of ammunition (including rocks and pointed sticks), or they cannot find any more.

Imagine throwing a lit road flare into a western US forest some windy day, and tell me what you'll have in half an hour. That is what happens once you cross the line from political struggle to enforcing your will through force of arms, or attempting such.

Don't believe me, though.

Ask the Caesars.
Or Genghis Khan.
William Tecumseh Sherman.
Little Adolph.
Ho Chi Minh.
Saddam Hussein.
The Taliban.
And a countless legion of lesser examples of the phenomenon.

Poll the city fathers of Carthage, Jerusalem, Atlanta, Warsaw, Nanking, Hiroshima, Saigon, and Fallujah about the idea of "limited" conflagrations.

That's what lies at the Von Clausewitz transition between politics and other means.
Every. God-damned. Time. Forever.

But the dirtiest brawls are bar-room brawls, and the bloodiest are always those between friends and family. The individual exemplars we all know illustrate the tendencies of the group rather succinctly.

As they will in this case.

You might think that after Lexington, Bull Run, 1914, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, and countless other ball-openers, folks would learn that conflict at the civilizational survival level isn't "one quick volley, a whiff of grapeshot, and then glory", with brandy and cigars afterwards in the drawing room, nor are the "troops home by Christmas". Ever.

Once it opens, people in that sort of struggle will not fight until they can't, but rather until you can't. And usually because your bloody charred remnants can no longer pull themselves together to attempt another blow.

Never do your blood enemy a small injury.

Okay, Lunatic Leftards: challenge accepted.
"Tell the sheriff that his posse had best be well-mounted, and to leave the married men at home."
Call that toss in the air.


Anonymous said...

I am consistently amazed by the patience and tolerance of most Americans, and the utter, deranged stupidity of other Americans.

There are - for now - two "opposition" groups: Those who, when the flag goes up will seek to resolve immediate problems with the minimum amount of applied violence, and those who recognize that no amount of applied violence is enough or satisfactorily thorough.

I predict that, for a while at least, there will be no way to differentiate between those two groups. After some indeterminate time the first group will return to garrison while the second rewrites the definition of "pogrom."

The Left not only does not understand this concept, it has no capability to realize that such a concept exists.

This will not be the slightest bit enjoyable for anyone.

MMinLamesa said...

Another one out of the park-common sense on so many levels that for whatever reason, 10s of millions of Americans might as well be hearing an astrophysics lecture in Aramaic.

That video of actual war footage was very sobering.

G Russell said...

Thank you. That is salve on my wounds of doubt.

Anonymous said...

America has never been a "democratic republic."
It was, for a short time, a Constitutional Republic.

American gringo

Anonymous said...

"The fact that so many of our "conservative" leaders are desperate to kowtow to Schumer Pelosi et al. at the first opportunity doesn't help." Whose leaders are you talking about paleface?

Aesop said...

@American gringo

That's a grammatical distinction without a difference, and picayune gainsaying won't get you anywhere you think you want to go.

Anonymous said...

A factual confirmation (about the communists and Left) of your article: breitbart.com/big-journalism/2018/07/24/woke-nation-joe-scarborough-rebrands-the-resistance-as-tea-party-of-2018/

Anonymous said...

I'm not trying to gainsay shit.
That comment is born of my fatigue
from to often hearing far too many of
our supposed peers, teammates, and
leaders (who should know better) using
"democratic republic" in the grammatical manner I criticize.
Okay, that's not you. Fair enough.

Anonymous said...

The New Left Is Coming for You

The new normal.

Aesop said...

We are a democratic republic.
We have a representative form of government, hence a republic, with those representatives elected by and from, the people, hence democratic.

What we aren't, and what ought to be criticized, is any nitwit blathering about the US being a "democracy".
Democracy is the mob, and it scared hell out of the Founding fathers, with good reason, and they saw to it, as originally enacted, that you could only directly elect exactly one person, ever, in your entire lifetime, at the federal/national level: your district's congressweasel.

How constitutional it is, or ever was, is subject to some debate, depending on what particular injury one wishes to highlight.

Sean said...

One of the odd things about waking up every day during a war, (VN) was realizing I was In a war, everyday. There wasn't gunfire every day, and when there was gunfire, there was a lot of it. Nearly every day in the rubber plantations, I would see a dead body, and sometimes more than one. That was one kind of war, ours here will be another. I don't know how it will be each day, I only know I will probably hope it is over soon. I thought that way, back then, during firefights. Your mouth gets hyper-dry, your lungs get lots of smoke that makes it rotten to breathe, and you can feel tiredness take over your body like an ocean wave after the adrenaline wears off. I was in one shoot-out in Cambodia that lasted for three days. Actually, they had us trapped. And I got promoted to M-60 machine gunner as part of some equal opportunity thing or whatever. But I remember combat was something that I always got real mad while doing it. When atrocities happen, don't be surprised.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, a lot of the major ring leaders will escape to their enclaves in the Southern Hemisphere.

Aesop said...

@ the Anonymii:

1) Joe Scarborough is a loon, lifetime, inclusive.

2) The Commentary fap-fest is Demotards whistling past the graveyard of their increasing irrelevancy to the American people.
#Walkaway is a thing, and Trump's numbers are surging by every measure.
Wetting your pants for two years non-stop doesn't impress anyone except the other crybabies. They're going to pay for that strategy over and over until they knock it off.

Now, if somebody could just find us an Attorney General, somewhere, anywhere, that wanted to do the job, and would show up to work, that would be the pin that would let the last squeal of air out of the lunatics' balloons.
Last I heard, we sent Sessions to draining the swamp; he went out looking for a shovel, and hasn't been seen nor heard from since.

End the vigil, declare him legally dead, give him a nice wake, and then appoint someone looking for scalps, and willing to fight the alligators and actually get to draining that swamp.

3) How'd that work out for Adolph Eichmann?

Matt Bracken said...

The Left projects their own thinking on their enemies in the right. They know that if they had the whip hand, they'd use it, so they mistake our Christian forbearance for weakness. Big mistake. When the Saxon awakes, the Left will learn too late what all of those millions of rifles and billions of rounds of ammo were purchased for.

T-Rav said...

Wow, I didn't think it was the use of "sanguine" that would get me in trouble. :-)

I didn't intend to imply that anyone here is actually jonesing for a good old-fashioned throwdown with the leftards (though it is fun to think about sometimes). What I meant was more that I have doubts about how such a throwdown will go when it inevitably happens. Again, this is probably because of my particular surroundings, being raised in a relative absence of guns and an absolute abundance of EBT recipients. Others here probably have a more accurate read on things. But given my own observations, I just don't know how many people will get out there and take such actions as described in your "Tomorrow" post. If pressed, I would say "not enough." Not enough people willing to take up arms, to hide out from the feds or to shelter those who are, not enough willing to do more than snipe from the comfort of their keyboards (and I include myself there).

Anyway, I'm not in disagreement with anything you've said here, I'm mainly just pessimistic about what happens once we do go over the edge.

Calsdad said...

Everybody seems to think the lunacy started in 2016. It did not. It started at least as far back as Obama's first election back in the 2007-2008 time frame. Maybe the breadth and tempo of the insanity has increased, but the roots were well planted *at least* as far back as 2007.

I've heard it said that people get more conservative as they get older. Well the group I worked with at that time was chock full of white men in their 40's - with a not insignificant percentage that were full lunatic for Obama. I seriously peeved off one of them when I told him I hoped Obama would get elected.

When he gleefully asked why, I responded that I figured Obama as President would destroy the Democrat party and lead to the implosion of liberalism in this country. From that response I think I sent his blood pressure up into the 200 range - judging by the shades of red on his face and how far the veins in his neck were pulsing out.

Remember - this was a 40-something white male - who was PISSED that I would make that comment. This was before he even got elected.

The lunacy has been there for a LONG time.

I also believe that making them go full retard - is EXACTLY what you want. The problem with lunatics who keep themselves largely under control, is that they can do extensive damage while everybody just turns their head and ignores the issue. Once they start ACTIVELY attacking people - then you're morally able to put them down. I believe one of the reasons why the Americans won their revolution, was that the British put out the first punch. Everything that followed after that had moral legitimacy. It is non-intuitive, but the best thing for us in the long run may well be that the left loses their shit and actively starts trying to pull everything down and attacking people. At that point the gloves can legitimately and morally be removed.

Unknown said...

Great article ! I am constantly amazed at my Liberal co-workers ( I work in Seattle) with their middle school belief that they reach into the White House and remove Tump/Pence and still have a country .When I gently break it to them that some portion of their countrymen may disagree and make a fuss about their removal . Their reply is telling " The people must follow the rule of law" or " Laws are laws and must be followed .
My hat is off to the Conservative Right for their un-ending patience with the Left . But make no mistake about it liberals want conservative/deplorables dead , dead ,dead . Seattle is home to the far nutty left and they are well armed and seeking conflict.

Unknown said...

Not going Old Testament at 1st Bull Run and annihilating the deep state then as they picniced gleefully expecting to see their fledgling war machine slaughtering those imbecilic southerners was a terribly tragic mistake.

Appomattox is what led us here.

Round 3 coming up I'm afraid.

Anonymous said...

I do not believe anything of any real import will happen until the economy tanks. As long as the Sheeple, Normies, Dindus, Vato Locos, and the other drones are still comfy, life will lurch on. If some dude, who is stupid enough to wear a MAGA hat in Times Square, gets pounded into raspberry jelly the folks will tsk-tsk. When their plastic will not work and they do not have enough debt paper or silver to obtain needful things, then it will be kickoff. Bleib ubrig.

RandyGC said...

Aesop, I do believe you do Mr. Godwin an injustice. I'm paraphrasing, but his observation (never stated by him as a law) was that the longer an internet discussion went on, the probability of someone invoking Hitler/NAZIs approached 100%

The BS version stated as a law that the one who invokes Hitler loses the argument was probably made up by some loser (likely a leftist) that didn't like to be called out on his NAZI style behavior or attitude.

I think the observation is still valid, and find the invocation of the "law" a good indicator of morons I can safely ignore while the adults have a conversation.

Unknown said...

Uh. Kergtratulations. Saxons were civilized Vikes, no? Anyways. Relevant, but posturing in my opinion. Perhaps a brief respite from 24/7 immersion in this maddening madness, say, a month maybe, might change a few hearts and minds. Appreciative of the pep, but God is in charge. And minus the news, and the usual aholes strutting about as petty, like really petty, tyrants, I personally am not seeing the same view as thee. At least not since I let go of my expectations of being able to predict the future.

Aesop said...

You aren't in trouble, the response just triggered additional thoughts, and the next thing I know I've got an essay going.

@Matt Bracken
Concur completely.

We're actually past that point, as the riots in Berzerkeley, gunning down congressmen, and 50 other incidents from the Left prove. All that's wanting is for them to start pushing in an organized way, or a consistent but unorganized way.
As I said in the post, they're angling, time after time, for a Harper's Ferry or Ft. Sumter moment, and like those guys in the video digging up an IED, eventually they're going to get the explosion they think they want. Right in their own faces.
And this nonsense has been going on since closer to 1900.
It's just that now they've gone Full Retard, and any pretense at shared outlook or power-sharing has been dropped. The Left is fangs-out for all their long-held desires, and not even concerned that everyone can see the crazy dripping from their chin.
When you see someone in public acting full-goose bozo, it's a signal that bad things are going to happen soon. But that's just twenty years' experience in the ER talking.
@Family Gene
The Left thinks it's only "settled Law" when they make it.
"That which is mine is mine, that which is yours is mine" is how playground fistfights start. We're older than that, and fists aren't what their childish nonsense is going to get them. Some people only learn their mistake when bullet holes in their liver are pumping blood. Seen it on the small scale, and fear we're about to see the group version of that very shortly.

Reg T said...

The "liberalism is a mental disorder" may have started out as a witty put-down of the rabid Left, but I think we all have seen - especially since Trump was elected - that it is not only not funny, it is something we need to keep firmly in mind. The behavior of the Left has become psychotic, where it had "merely" been sociopathic, before. What is partly humorous about their penchant for projection of their pathology onto us.

"Godwin's Law" should cause a deep belly-laugh, because the fools who accuse the Right of being Nazis are too ignorant (and too poorly educated in today's schools) to understand that Nazis were socialists, with much the same platform as the Democrats:

Adolf Hitler, May 1, 1927

We do need to be cognizant of their mental state, because so many of them are not capable of being rational. SEIU thugs and other union members - many of them "deer hunters" - will certainly be armed, and thinking that they will be able to roll right over us, based on how much we have allowed them to get away with. Many of them will go down shrieking that they can't believe they were shot, that it wasn't supposed to happen that way. A bit like the Moro tribesmen, upon running into .45 caliber pistols and 30-40 Krag rifles while thinking they were invincible.

Insanity has a quality all its own.

Just don't imagine or expect rational behavior from them in the time leading up to the dance, during the dance, or in its aftermath.

Aesop said...

@not-so Anonymous 4:01
All politics is local, and nothing's more local than having a job, or scrambling for a crust of bread, but it is seldom as important as people imagine.
Nonetheless, the Left is getting more and more brazen in starting something where there's no cause to, and behaving in amore irrational, psychotic, and violently deranged manner the further they slip the bonds of reality, and this at a time of record economic success, running at double and pushing triple the abysmal Obama-long Recession.
If economics was the only motivation, WWII would have started 10 years earlier, and WWI would never have started at all.
Other forces are in play, and Joe Average's situation is noteworthy sometimes, but the impetus for this will not be average people with rational concerns.
A sudden downturn would mainly remove the moral stays keeping a lot of people from hunting the left down like feral pigs, and solving their problem rather permanently. The Left, most of all, should be hoping for a long and prosperous season. When (not if - these are as cyclical as the tides) a sharp correction a la 2008 or 1999 comes, or worse, if it's bad enough, it will mainly allow cover to settle local scores.
Notably, in neither 1965, Detroit and Newark after MLK was shot, nor Rodney King did the Dindus go to City Hall, Beverly Hills, or any other rich suburbs, to get at The Man, because in both cases they would have been machine-gunned down on the spot, and they knew it. But an awful lot of scores with the sonofabitch at the local market got settled in both cases. And in all those instances, the economy was humming right along at both times. Resentment and envy don't depend on one's financial or economic status. That's just one very small, and mainly irrelevant, part of the puzzle.

Mike Godwin is an unredeemed left-wing fucktard, and the law has been used exactly as intended, any protestations to the contrary neatly undone by him revealing his own TDS demons in recent years. Consult the bastion of truthiness itself, Wikipedia for examples: hoist by his own petard.
Godwin's law is the worst of amateur leftist philosophy, and any complaints that he didn't mean for it to be used - as it is, almost unfailingly - to limit debate, and as a rhetorical club by the mentally handicapped for same - fall on deaf ears.
When he promulgates Godwin's Second law: That quoting or invoking Godwin's Law at all is the province of rhetorical midgets and the intellectually stunted, who should be called out for being retarded - I will recant my sentiments.
Until then, as the man who built a club used by exactly such @$$clowns, he's rather like Einstein, watching the nuclear mushroom cloud, and telling people "I gave you E=Mc², but I didn't mean for you to do that with it..."

Aesop said...

@Unknown 7:31
1) Clearly, you're entirely unfamiliar with the works of Kipling.
2) Where would one go to not be immersed in exactly the cultural battle being fought, rather obviously, in the entire culture?
And if one could go there for a month, why would they ever come back?
Even were such possible, it would be futile.
You may not be interested in the derangement of the political left, but the deranged political left is interested in you.
Given sway, which has been their entire aim for at least a century and a half, they will have not only your verbal assent, but rather more than that, given free reign to compel it, and one is a bit late to the protest when they're being loaded into boxcars and being assigned working parties inside the barbed wire.
Perhaps you're more familiar with the works of Mr. Solzhenitsyn?
3) Flippant allusions to God's control are irrelevant. God was in control at Sodom, but He didn't even reveal his plans to Abraham until the last moment, and he was in charge at Nineveh, but that didn't do Jonah any good. Presumably He was in charge at Pompeii, and Carthage, and Hiroshima too. Good luck expecting Him to whisper in your ear about when it's time to pay attention.
So evidently the works of Moses, the Prophets, and the authors of the Evangelion are similarly unfamiliar to you. Or even the teleplays of Sorkin.
4) "Predicting" that water will freeze at 1 Atm at 32°F. is not prognostication, it is merely application of observed physical laws to the behavior of atomic elements.
People, even right now in this very country, shoot bad persons thousands of times a year (many multiple times more than all police combined), and point guns at them more than an estimated two millions of times a year - literally, once every fifteen seconds, on average - such that it is no great trick to posit that they will act as a group exactly as they do individually, when ability meets need on a much larger scale. So one may infer you are similarly unacquainted with the works of both Frederic Tudor and John Lott.

That's quite a tremendous deficit of education to overcome in one blog post.
I earnestly implore you to stick with it.

Lugh said...

America fought with the Communists against the Nationalists of Europe. Why? Because Capitalism is Globalist in its late stage, just like Communism. And if you go deeper, you'll find they funded the rise of Communism to act as their mercenaries against traditional cultures. Until this is understood, nothing but further tragedy will ensue. Conservatives conserve nothing because Corporate Capitalism is a whirlpool of destruction, sucking down individuals, communities, cultures, nations, and races. America will be different? No, it won't be.

Aesop said...

I try to keep an open mind. No, really.

But that codswallop is quite simply and utterly just plain retarded, and so full of so many errors and whackjobian jackassery, in so many disciplines, I sincerely doubt I could fisk it all in any ten posts.
Don't tempt me.
But thanks for flying your flag.

streamfortyseven said...

Most of the real trouble would come from the dependent populations: those dependent on EBT cards, those dependent on illegal drugs, those dependent on prescription drugs which have medically difficult withdrawal syndromes - which is nearly all of them, those dependent on psychiatric medications. All that's needed is for water pressure to go to zero, and unless they know about field sanitation, which few do, it won't take much for a cholera epidemic to get started - or typhoid. The opioid crisis would quickly be over, as well as the meth epidemic. In the major cities - even medium sized cities - there wouldn't be a lot of people able to do much of anything after about two weeks. Out in the rural areas, the meth-addicted would die off pretty quick, one way or another. Given that the People's Liberation Army controls a pretty massive port facility in Long Beach, CA, it wouldn't take much to ship in a bunch of Communist Chinese troops and materiel in those brightly colored containers you see on railroad cars in every part of the US - and they could take the cities in no time at all. From there, it's anyone's guess. I think that would stop any civil war, though, not that the end result of *that* would be anything anyone would want.

soapweed said...

Aesop: Dayum, boy... Next time your exhaust stack is cherry red with all this energy, maybe could you swing by and help me with jes a leetle beet of fencin'? You're hittin' on ALL eight again..... OK, will you just help tamp in the posts?

Tucanae Services said...

I believe that the case could be made that the country is already at war. I merely refer you to the weekly body count in Chicago and Baltimore as an example. The singular difference is that the engagement is economic currently not political.

Tactless Wookie said...

To quote Lawless.....

"Sharpen your hatchet."

Aesop said...

@ streamfortyseven,

I refer you, once again, to Los Angeles, water-free for two weeks, and on "boil water" orders post the Northridge Quake. No such outbreak.
People, even shiftless and crazy ones, are far more resilient than doomer porn imagines. Any trip to the Turd World will confirm this, for those with stout hearts and strong constitutions.

Longer-term scenarios, like >90 days, is where things start to get iffier.
When people stay home, it's a lot harder to start or sustain an epidemic.
For a really good one, you need people going to school, work, and shopping, all things that won't happen if/when "water pressure goes to zero".
Ask me how I know.

China has the use of a large container facility in Long Beach.
"Control", OTOH, is a word highly unlikely to pass the sniff test in so much as a localized riot.
And containers of Chicoms troops in containers?
Sh'yeah, and monkeys flying outta my butt.
More deer hunters deploy on one morning at the start of deer season in just PA than the entire active duty strength of the U.S. Army.
And they're better shots.

Were China to deploy half the PLA, a million men, they would be hard-pressed to "take" so much as Califrutopia, let alone any number of "the cities" beyond its borders.
They wouldn't find much to forage, and they'd be independent units taking fire from all sides, simultaneously, every time they showed their faces. They would be wiped out in detail inside a week, by which time apocalyptic numbers of nukes would already have flown.

You might also refer to the Powers Booth scene in the original Red Dawn regarding how many screaming Chinamen would be around if they pulled that. It's tough to support an army 6500 miles away when 2/3rds of your home population and 9/10ths of your heavy industry is radioactive smoking glass craters in about half an hour.

That's besides the fact that by putting that many troops here, they'd be suddenly fighting opportunistic conflicts against Russia, India, Pakistan, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Australia by the next day, three of whom are also nuclear powers, and four more of which could be such in about a week. For Japan, probably in about an hour. Singapore and Indonesia would probably tag along too, and they'd have internal uprisings/revolts in Tibet and Hong Kong.

Conflict with the US would cost them pretty much their national existence for two centuries, at minimum.


Chicongo and the Balitomorons are not fighting an economic war, they're merely failed cities overrun with crime, with only vigilantism held in check by TPTB.

Five seconds after a war broke out, refer to the example of several Mexican towns, who self-armed, wiped out the cartels, and killed any government troops and police attempting to re-assert their authority, on the quite legitimate grounds that the government kleptocracy in power in Mexico since it was founded as such was the cause of all their problems.
Given the availability of guns in either city, a war meaning the gloves were completely off would mean the life expectancy of thugs and cops in either place could be measured in minutes.
Followed by the largest number of lynchings in US history, at least half of whose victims would be wearing suits and ties, and wearing municipal ID.
The Loop would probably be renamed the Rahm Emmanuel Memorial Hanging Scaffolds, with a modern day Madame DeFarge knitting to the side and cheering the mob on until the entire government had been wiped out to the last crooked judge, building inspector, and civic pencil pusher.

It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Anonymous said...

Inhabitants of Seattle or any other city may think they want conflict but again they are relying on their middle school beliefs. They are armed got that. Have they been trained? Zeroed their weapon? Have a boatload of ammo? If so, have they considered some key tactical disadvantages of being in a big city? Do they think their water, food, fuel, and electricity are all made in Seattle? If not, have they planned to take and defend where those do come from? When the electricity goes off, probably the first ‘shot’, have they factored in the EBT crowd and counted out those that will melt down when there is no internet or TV? Even if they’ve prepped to the nines how are they going to keep it while simultaneously riding out to ‘fly over country’ to ‘get those deplorables’. Are they in shape for that ride/hump? If they are like the libtards around me they love to run and ride fancy bikes many miles. Sure they are healthy but a 50lb load of gear and weapons will wipe them out most ricky-tic. Have they thought about land navigation or do they think they can ride out on the highway in their SUV’s and survive? There are a bunch of other factors I haven’t even touched upon and they all take forethought and planning. As many here of said, it will not go as any of us have imagined and it will be ugly.

streamfortyseven said...

Rethink? Sure.

I'm talking about these things in the context of a nationwide civil war without "fronts". We're not talking about the Yankee army invading Northern Virginia, we're talking more like Bleeding Kansas on a nationwide scale, with irregular Confederate and abolitionist militias fighting it out. My great-great grandfather organized such a militia in 1855 - he was a Captain in the US Army until 1850, when he settled in Liberty, MO, north of what is now Kansas City. Members of his militia included Quantrill, the Younger brothers, Bloody Bill Anderson, Frank James (Jesse's older brother), and others of like mind. Kansas had two state capitols, one at Lecompton - the Confederate capitol, which had a slave market - and one at Tecumseh, the Abolitionist capitol, 8 miles away. At the time he was eventually captured by the Federals in 1861, he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Confederate States Army. It made quite an impression on people, such that it was a dinner table conversation topic 100 years later in the 1960s. The fighting around Jackson County was so intense that the Yankee commander of occupation troops ordered that the homes and farms of people with Confederate sympathies be burned to the ground, their livestock killed, and their crops burned in the fields - a local version of Sherman's March. The Yankees took a large number of family members of Confederates as hostages - including Quantrill's wife - and housed them in a building in Kansas City. It burned down under suspicious circumstances - and Quantrill saw his wife burned to death. The result of that was the massacre, sacking, and burning of Lawrence, KS in 1863 by Quantrill's militia. And so forth. Imagine something like that on a nationwide scale.

As I said, those people who are drug dependent are going to be out of luck, which means big time medical problems for a lot of people. We have a lot of people running around who are kept relatively normal by psychiatric meds. No more, so they're going to get really dysfunctional, really quick, especially in the stress of civil war. Same case for drug addicts. Insulin-dependent people - they're toast. And so on. Boiling water is going to be a real challenge without electricity or natural gas, so people will have to have wood fires going 24/7. Unless you have a cast-iron stove, doing this without burning down your house is going to be a real challenge - and if you burn down your house, you may end up burning down the neighborhood, because the Fire Department may not show up.

As for the "massive nuclear retaliation" scenario you mention, if the US turned the coasts of China into radioactive glass, that would put millions of tons of fallout into the atmosphere. Prevailing winds run from west to east. The western states get fallout right now from Chinese coal generation plants, that's the reason for all of those colorful sunsets, it takes about three or four days for that to get over here. Nuclear weapons effects are not local - we got fallout from Chernobyl here in Kansas, for example. Most people are not familiar with Cresson Kearny's Nuclear War Survival Skills book, so they're going to be in one hell of a fix if your scenario plays out. When I was in high school (1970s), I was in an Explorer Scout group dedicated to Civil Defense and Emergency Medicine, so I got to see a lot of things that are certainly available for people to educate themselves about - I assume that maybe 1% of the population knows anything about this. (continued)

streamfortyseven said...

(continued from previous)
Then there are the John Brown Gun Clubs, the Redneck Revolt groups, the Progressive Youth Organization and Red Guards (both Maoist groups, btw), and the heavily-armed MS-13 and other drug gangs - liberals will be the least of your difficulties, in fact I'll bet they spend their last days wringing their hands and whining - they've had lots of practice. Apparently, retired members - mostly enlisted - of the US Army are engaged in training these Maoist/authoritarian Communist groups in weapons usage, movements, and other such topics. The advantage that these people have is that they're young and in comparatively good physical condition. They also know Chairman Mao by heart, they've been solidly indoctrinated in taxpayer-supported community colleges and universities. I've known a few - and gotten into long arguments on line. As I said, the level of indoctrination is amazing. You might want to have a look at what your kids are studying - most of the kids I know who are in this come from rural backgrounds and are amongst those deer hunters you talk about.

OK, I'll leave it at that. Your turn.

RandyGC said...

I never actually knew anything about Godwin the person, I was pulling from my memory from the early days of USENET and how his original statement morphed into a club to be pulled out as soon as someone realized they weren't winning on facts. Today is the first time I even looked at the Wikipedia article.

You live and learn, or you don't live long---RAH

RandyGC said...

Gee, maybe someone should take the gist of the post by Anonymous @1:19 PM and write a series of posts exploring the various factors mentioned ;-)

Anonymous said...

A factor I never see mentioned in these articles is the fact that we would not conduct such a war in a vacuum. I am not trying to be a negative nancy but I would like someone to seriously consider the fact that the weaponless, flabby soyboys of the big cities don't need to do any shooting when they're perfectly willing to import half the third world to do it for them, along with UN "peacekeepers" (an oddly overlapping crew) with the whole-hearted support of the EU, Russia, and China--and that's just for starters. We won't be fighting against the harpies of the local gender studies department. We'll be fighting against machete-wielding "Dreamers" who will be delighted to inflict their own brand of third-world warfare on us as well as any women and children that cross their path. The South had all the guns, ammo, and warfighters, too.

What nations would side with the red states? Europe is a lost cause, except for Poland, Hungary, and the like. Name one first world country that could be relied upon to support the racist sexist bigot homophobes of the American south, caricatured in the foreign imagination by Hollywood as fat, overall-clad, banjo-playing sodomites? (The one kind of gay that is not okay.)

The coasts would fling open the gates to a flood of immigrants the likes of which we've never seen, hand them weapons manufactured overseas, weapons cheerfully provided FOR FREE by Russia and China, and while we might prevail, we would be facing a form of primitive warfare that thinks nothing of mutilating mothers so they can't nurse their children, and who would just as readily beat red state childrens' brains into trees, like the Killing Trees of Cambodia. Behind those lines would be the cities, who may or may not be supplied by the rest of the world; if I were the left, I wouldn't count on the world's support to extend to bountiful water and food indefinitely.

Again, I don't WANT this. But someone had better add it to their calculations.